The four-legged powerpack can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right-side up or upside down.

Weighing around 9kg, the quadruped can quickly right itself when kicked to the ground with a swift swing of its elbows. It can even perform a 360-degree backflip from a standing position.

The developers claim the “mini cheetah” is designed to be “virtually indestructible,” recovering with little damage, even if a backflip ends in a spill.

In the event that a limb or motor does break, the robot is designed with modularity in mind. Each of the robot’s legs is powered by three identical, low-cost electric motors that the researchers engineered using off-the-shelf parts. Each motor can easily be swapped out for a new one.

“You could put these parts together, almost like Legos,” said Benjamin Katz, lead developer and a technical associate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn’t break easily and if it does break, it’s easy and not very expensive to fix.”

The team is aiming to produce 10 of the robots and then loan them to other research groups to give engineers an opportunity to test out novel algorithms and manoeuvres on a highly dynamic robot.

“Eventually, I’m hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms and we can see which strategy is more effective,” said Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering. “That’s how you accelerate research.”

The mini cheetah is more than just a miniature version of its predecessor, Cheetah 3 – a large, heavy, formidable robot, which often needs to be stabilised with tethers to protect its expensive, custom-designed parts.

“In Cheetah 3, everything is super-integrated, so if you want to change something, you have to do a ton of redesign,” Katz said. “Whereas with the mini cheetah, if you wanted to add another arm, you could just add three or four more of these modular motors.”

Katz came up with the electric motor design by reconfiguring the parts to small, commercially available motors normally used in drones and remote-controlled airplanes.

Each of the robot’s 12 motors is about the size of a Mason jar lid and consists of a stator, or set of coils, which generates a rotating magnetic field; a small controller that conveys the amount of current the stator should produce; a rotor, lined with magnets, that rotates with the stator’s field, producing torque to lift or rotate a limb; a gearbox that provides a 6:1 gear reduction, enabling the rotor to provide six times the torque that it normally would; and a position sensor that measures the angle and orientation of the motor and associated limb.

Each leg is powered by three motors, to give it three degrees of freedom and a huge range of motion. The lightweight, high-torque, low-inertia design enables the robot to execute fast, dynamic manoeuvres and make high-force impacts on the ground without breaking gearboxes or limbs.

“The rate at which it can change forces on the ground is really fast,” Katz said. “When it’s running, its feet are only on the ground for something like 150 milliseconds at a time, during which a computer tells it to increase the force on the foot, then change it to balance, and then decrease that force really fast to lift up. So it can do really dynamic stuff, like jump in the air with every step, or run with two feet on the ground at a time. Most robots aren’t capable of doing this, so move much slower.”

The four-legged powerpack can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right-side up or upside down.

Weighing around 9kg, the quadruped can quickly right itself when kicked to the ground with a swift swing of its elbows. It can even perform a 360-degree backflip from a standing position.

The developers claim the “mini cheetah” is designed to be “virtually indestructible,” recovering with little damage, even if a backflip ends in a spill.

In the event that a limb or motor does break, the robot is designed with modularity in mind. Each of the robot’s legs is powered by three identical, low-cost electric motors that the researchers engineered using off-the-shelf parts. Each motor can easily be swapped out for a new one.

“You could put these parts together, almost like Legos,” said Benjamin Katz, lead developer and a technical associate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn’t break easily and if it does break, it’s easy and not very expensive to fix.”

The team is aiming to produce 10 of the robots and then loan them to other research groups to give engineers an opportunity to test out novel algorithms and manoeuvres on a highly dynamic robot.

“Eventually, I’m hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms and we can see which strategy is more effective,” said Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering. “That’s how you accelerate research.”

The mini cheetah is more than just a miniature version of its predecessor, Cheetah 3 – a large, heavy, formidable robot, which often needs to be stabilised with tethers to protect its expensive, custom-designed parts.

“In Cheetah 3, everything is super-integrated, so if you want to change something, you have to do a ton of redesign,” Katz said. “Whereas with the mini cheetah, if you wanted to add another arm, you could just add three or four more of these modular motors.”

Katz came up with the electric motor design by reconfiguring the parts to small, commercially available motors normally used in drones and remote-controlled airplanes.

Each of the robot’s 12 motors is about the size of a Mason jar lid and consists of a stator, or set of coils, which generates a rotating magnetic field; a small controller that conveys the amount of current the stator should produce; a rotor, lined with magnets, that rotates with the stator’s field, producing torque to lift or rotate a limb; a gearbox that provides a 6:1 gear reduction, enabling the rotor to provide six times the torque that it normally would; and a position sensor that measures the angle and orientation of the motor and associated limb.

Each leg is powered by three motors, to give it three degrees of freedom and a huge range of motion. The lightweight, high-torque, low-inertia design enables the robot to execute fast, dynamic manoeuvres and make high-force impacts on the ground without breaking gearboxes or limbs.

“The rate at which it can change forces on the ground is really fast,” Katz said. “When it’s running, its feet are only on the ground for something like 150 milliseconds at a time, during which a computer tells it to increase the force on the foot, then change it to balance, and then decrease that force really fast to lift up. So it can do really dynamic stuff, like jump in the air with every step, or run with two feet on the ground at a time. Most robots aren’t capable of doing this, so move much slower.”